


The Tile

by Twelvefootmountaintroll



Series: Seven Stones [3]
Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Broh Week, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-01
Updated: 2012-08-01
Packaged: 2017-11-11 05:35:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/475081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twelvefootmountaintroll/pseuds/Twelvefootmountaintroll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What is the nature of a beginning?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tile

**Author's Note:**

> Day three prompt: Devotion.

Like a leaf budding in the spring, it begins. There is no single moment to be pinned down and pointed to, no one memory to look back on. Just as a bud must spring from a bare twig, and so must follow the winter; just as a twig must lose its autumn leaves to become bare; just as those autumn leaves grew first as buds; so did it begin before it had ever begun and so will it begin after it ends.

One bud, maybe, is a bouquet of flowers picked roadside and taken along for a journey to a modest manorial summer home outside the city. Clutched in eager fingers, they can hardly know their import; does the leaf know the stretching of the trunk as it grasps for the sky, or the insidious roots reaching into the Earth?

The bud, vivid green, like a pair of wide eyes sparkling with amusement, starts to unfurl at a knock on the front door. One Master Bolin is announced. (How he loves those four syllables!) One General Iroh receives him graciously, thanking him for the biddings of good health.

“How’s the shoulder, sir?” asks one of them or the other.

And in response, “The healers tell me I injured it firebending after the shock from the Equalist’s glove, but it’s expected to be back to normal in a week.”

Yet half an hour is all it takes for the bud to fan out, to start soaking in the sun.

Another leaf springs slowly into shape with the ebb and flow of people in the city like the coursing of sap through the vessels of a great tree. It begins far-off. A slow-forming thought is the utmost tip of a finer-than-hair root steadily drinking in water. It does not create, nor does it synthesize; it simply reorders what is already there.

The thought, fully formed, is drawn into the flow towards the center. Lack and necessity are a vacuum, and where there are people, there is want. The thought’s destiny, the fate of that single water drop, can be known to itself as well as it can be known to the system: not at all. Yet purpose will take it where it needs to go. One leaf will not go thirsty while another drowns—not when there is purpose.

Picked up in the great surge of the metropolis, it nearly disappears. Haste becomes ponderous on the grander scale. It inches, mile by mile, to its destination. The bud is almost unaware of its thirst, so intent is it on its unfolding.

Finally that singular drop of water arrives, coalescing in the form of a gently worn anorak. And the bud, in its unfurling, sees the need in a fast-approaching trip to the Arctic south, for a wondrous healer lives there and a friend is in need of healing.

And perhaps the brilliant autumn colors bloom in this once-bud when in the anorak a small tile of golden jade marble is found. The small tile of golden jade marble is also found to be identical to those that had been admired in a modest summer home.

So this is how it begins, many times over. This is how it began, this is how it will begin, and this is how it ends.


End file.
